On the sea, seven miles from Havana, and connected with it by a convenient railway, at a place called Vedado, I found a lodging house kept by a Frenchman (the best cook in Cuba) with a German wife. The situation was so attractive, and the owners of it so attentive, that quiet people went often into 'retreat' there. There were delicious rooms, airy and solitary as I could wish. The sea washed the coral rock under the windows. There were walks wild as if there was no city within a thousand miles—up the banks of lonely rivers, over open moors, or among inclosures where there were large farming establishments with cattle and horses and extensive stables and sheds. There was a village and a harbour where fishing people kept their boats and went out daily with their nets and lines—blacks and whites living and working side by side. I could go where I pleased without fear of interference or question. Only I was warned to be careful of the dogs, large and dangerous, descendants of the famous Cuban bloodhounds, which are kept everywhere to guard the yards and houses. These beasts were really dangerous, and had to be avoided. The shore was of inexhaustible interest. It was a level shelf of coral rock extending for many miles and littered over with shells and coral branches which had been flung up by the surf. I had hoped for bathing. In the open water it is not to be thought of on account of the sharks, but baths have been cut in the rock all along that part of the coast at intervals of half a mile; deep square basins with tunnels connecting them with the sea, up which the waves run clear and foaming. They are within inclosures, roofed over to keep out the sun, and with attendants regularly present. Art and nature combined never made more charming pools; the water clear as sapphire, aerated by the constant inrush of the foaming breakers, and so warm that you could lie in it without a chill for hours. Alas! that I could but look at them and execrate the precious Government which forbade me their use. So severe a tax is laid on these bathing establishments that the owners can only afford to keep them open during the three hottest months in the year, when the demand is greatest.
In the evenings people from Havana would occasionally come down to dine as we go to Greenwich, being attracted partly by the air and partly by my host's reputation. There was a long verandah under which tables were laid out, and there were few nights on which one or more parties were not to be seen there. Thus I encountered several curious specimens of Cuban humanity, and on one of my runs up to Havana I met again the cigar broker who had so roughly challenged my judgment. He was an original and rather diverting man; I should think a Jew. Whatever he was he fell upon me again and asked me scornfully whether I supposed that the cigars which I had bought of Señor Bances were anything out of the way. I said that they suited my taste and that was enough. 'Ah,' he replied, 'Cada loco con su tema. Every fool had his opinion.' 'I am the loco (idiot), then,' said I, 'but that again is matter of opinion.' He spoke of Cuba and professed to know all about it. 'Can you tell me, then,' said I, 'why the Cubans hate the Spaniards?' 'Why do the Irish hate the English?' he answered. I said it was not an analogous case. Cubans and Spaniards were of the same breed and of the same creed. 'That is nothing,' he replied; 'the Americans will have both Cuba and Ireland before long.' I said I thought the Americans were too wise to meddle with either. If they did, however, I imagined that on our own side of the Atlantic we should have something to say on the subject before Ireland was taken from us. He laughed good-humouredly. 'Is it possible, sir,' he said, 'that you live in England and are so absolutely ignorant?' I laughed too. He was a strange creature, and would have made an excellent character in a novel.
Don G—— or his brother came down occasionally to see how I was getting on and to talk philosophy and history. Other gentlemen came, and the favourite subject of conversation was Spanish administration. One of them told me this story as an illustration of it. His father was the chief partner in a bank; a clerk absconded, taking 50,000 dollars with him; he had been himself sent in pursuit of the man, overtook him with the money still in his possession, and recovered it. With this he ought to have been contented, but he tried to have the offender punished. The clerk replied to the criminal charge by a counter-charge against the house. It was absurd in itself, but he found that a suit would grow out of it which would swallow more than the 50,000 dollars, and finally he bribed the judge to allow him to drop the prosecution. Cosas de España; it lies in the breed. Guzman de Alfarache was robbed of his baggage by a friend. The facts were clear, the thief was caught with Guzman's clothes on his back; but he had influential friends—he was acquitted. He prosecuted Guzman for a false accusation, got a judgment and ruined him.
The question was, whether if the Cubans could make themselves independent there would be much improvement. The want in Cuba just now, as in a good many other places, is the want of some practical religion which insists on moral duty. A learned English judge was trying a case one day, when there seemed some doubt about the religious condition of one of the witnesses. The clerk of the court retired with him to ascertain what it really was, and returned radiant almost immediately, saying, 'All right, my lord. Knows he'll be damned—competent witness—knows he'll be damned.' That is really the whole of the matter. If a man is convinced that if he does wrong he will infallibly be punished for it he has then 'a saving faith.' This, unfortunately, is precisely the conviction which modern forms of religion produce hardly anywhere. The Cubans are Catholics, and hear mass and go to confession; but confession and the mass between them are enough for the consciences of most of them, and those who think are under the influence of the modern spirit, to which all things are doubtful. Some find comfort in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Some regard Christianity as a myth or poem, which had passed in unconscious good faith into the mind of mankind, and there might have remained undisturbed as a beneficent superstition had not Protestantism sprung up and insisted on flinging away everything which was not literal and historical fact. Historical fact had really no more to do with it than with the stories of Prometheus or the siege of Troy. The end was that no bottom of fact could be found, and we were all set drifting.
Notably too I observed among serious people there, what I have observed in other places, the visible relief with which they begin to look forward to extinction after death. When the authority is shaken on which the belief in a future life rests, the question inevitably recurs. Men used to pretend that the idea of annihilation was horrible to them; now they regard the probability of it with calmness, if not with actual satisfaction. One very interesting Cuban gentleman said to me that life would be very tolerable if one was certain that death would be the end of it. The theological alternatives were equally unattractive; Tartarus was an eternity of misery, and the Elysian Fields an eternity of ennui.
There is affectation in the talk of men, and one never knows from what they say exactly what is in their mind. I have often thought that the real character of a people shows itself nowhere with more unconscious completeness than in their cemeteries. Philosophise as we may, few of us are deliberately insincere in the presence of death; and in the arrangements which we make for the reception of those who have been dear to us, and in the lines which we inscribe upon their monuments, we show what we are in ourselves perhaps more than what they were whom we commemorate. The parish churchyard is an emblem and epitome of English country life; London reflects itself in Brompton and Kensal Green, and Paris in Père la Chaise. One day as I was walking I found myself at the gate of the great suburban cemetery of Havana. It was enclosed within high walls; the gateway was a vast arch of brown marble, beautiful and elaborately carved. Within there was a garden simply and gracefully laid out with trees and shrubs and flowers in borders. The whole space inclosed may have been ten acres, of which half was assigned to those who were contented with a mere mound of earth to mark where they lay; the rest was divided into family vaults covered with large white marble slabs, separate headstones marking individuals for whom a particular record was required, and each group bearing the name of the family the members of which were sleeping there. The peculiarity of the place was the absence of inscriptions. There was a name and date, with E.P.D.—'en paz descansa'[15]—or E.G.E.—'en gracia está'[16]—and that seemed all that was needed. The virtues of the departed and the grief of the survivors were taken for granted in all but two instances. There may have been more, but I could find only these.
One was in Latin:
AD COELITES EVOCATÆ UXORI EXIMÆ IGNATIUS.
Ignatius to his admirable wife who has been called up to heaven.
The other was in Spanish verse, and struck me as a graceful imitation of the old manner of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. The design on the monument was of a girl hanging an immortelle upon a cross. The tomb was of a Caridad del Monte, and the lines were:
Bendita Caridad, las que piadosa
Su mano vierte en la funérea losa
Son flores recogidas en el suelo,
Mas con su olor perfumaián el cielo.